Transform Your Workflow and Delight Patients with Digital Labs!
June 1, 2022Patient diagnostics form the backbone of modern medicine. They provide the essential insights needed for effective treatment. However, slow, manual processes have hindered laboratories in delivering accurate healthcare information for many years.
When medical tests are handled inefficiently, everyone, from patients to clinicians, suffers. As more hospitals adopt effective management software, we see Digital Laboratories rise.
A digital laboratory implements digital processes to communicate data informatics, ensure quality control, and improve diagnostic management.
The survey also suggests that as digital healthcare technology advances, lab digitization will become one of the prominent Healthcare IT Trends.
Let’s understand how digital labs benefit healthcare providers and the technicalities of implementing them.
Why Do Healthcare Providers Need Digital Laboratories?
Medical Decision Making
A typical laboratory produces a large volume of data, including patient health data and bioinformatics. This data plays a pivotal role in medical decisions, such as deciding the treatment plan and accessing underlying information from a given data set.
A digital laboratory makes the analysis process much more comprehensive and streamlined than a paper-based one. The data can be visualized, transmitted, and absorbed quickly by disparate systems, enabling decision-makers to understand lab test results correctly.
It’s done. You don’t have to struggle with static, manual reporting, which isn’t as transparent as digital reporting.
Digital Stakeholder Collaboration
Laboratories usually operate within an ecosystem of stakeholders comprising hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and scientists. Therefore, multiple stakeholders may require the data generated by a laboratory simultaneously while adhering to HIPAA guidelines.
Digitizing the data portability process allows laboratories to share test results with any stakeholder while ensuring data security. Moreover, the best HMS software enables hospitals and laboratories to share data electronically. As a result, doctors can work productively alongside lab technicians to achieve the best patient outcomes.
Speed of Laboratory Processes
Cloud technologies are accelerating the speed at which laboratories process data and make it available to clinicians. In the past, medical data reports had to be physically sent to hospitals, which was time-consuming and often prone to errors.
However, digital laboratories upload test results into secure, interconnected networks, which reduces tasks that once took several hours to mere seconds. Consequently, doctors can access patient reports from anywhere in the world in their desired format. As a result, they can make the right decisions quickly and efficiently.
What are the Challenges to Digital Laboratories?
Financial Economics
Digital laboratories use several technologies that are often cost-intensive, which challenges providers in meeting their financial requirements. However, as the penetration of digital technologies increases, costs are expected to decrease.
Many ready-to-use hospital management software products are available in the market that can curb digitization costs. However, as the scale of operations expands, end-to-end digitization may involve hefty investments that concern providers.
Lack of Solutions
As we discussed, laboratories operate in an interweb of medical entities, making it difficult to implement solutions that meet highly specific requirements. For a laboratory to operate digitally, the connected parties must also possess mechanisms for interpreting digitized data.
This can obstruct healthcare providers from designing customized solutions, as they become quite complex. Hence, the availability of plug-and-play solutions for digital laboratories is a matter of concern for digital lab adopters.
Data Security Concerns
While digital data is easier to access and distribute, it comes with additional security overheads. Organizations must rigorously harden IT systems, such as Hospital Information Systems and Laboratory Management Systems, to protect against data breaches.
These security concerns can make providers wary of fully digitized processes. “Security of electronic records” is one of the four pillars of HIPAA, the national law that healthcare providers must strictly abide by in all their practices. Hence, the skepticism around data security works as a deterrent to lab digitization.
How to Successfully TransitiLaboratorIt’s LaboratorIt’s
IFCC research shows that the benefits of digital laboratories outweigh the concerns. However, healthcare providers seeking digital solutions need the right guidance for administering this transition.
We offer a set of value points that will help healthcare providers successfully meet their implementation goals.
- Utilize FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles for warding off data security risks.
- Bring data risk management practices into play early to lay a strong foundation for the solutions.
- Educate and involve internal and external stakeholders in handling digital data safely.
- Transform legacy systems and existing processes to make them compatible with digital laboratories.
Healthcare providers can overcome challenges in adopting digital informatics by heeding the above points.
SoftClinic – A Digital Informatics Solution
SoftClinic is a leading hospital management software that offers quick and affordable digitization of hospital processes. It comes loaded with digital-ready features for daily hospital operations, such as patient management, laboratory management, and e-prescribing. Clinicians and healthcare centers can frictionlessly adopt SoftClinic to increase operational efficiency and step into the era of truly digital healthcare.
Key features of SoftClinic
- Digital Appointment System
- Digitized Equipment Interfacing
- Advance Data Analytics
- Integration with Bioinformatics Systems
- Integrated Laboratory Information System
- Secure Digital Reporting
Conclusion
Making health data portable and secure is a key trend in healthcare technology for 2022. As we move toward digital laboratories, we can expect significant changes in how healthcare providers manage and access patient data. Right now, healthcare providers are increasingly excited about this trend, and this enthusiasm is likely to grow in the coming years. However, the success of a digital laboratory relies not just on technology but also on how healthcare professionals manage and use data in the healthcare system.